Orange Trumpets

I’ve made a goodly number of crosses for white/red and white/orange trumpets. Using trumpets as both seed and pollen parents, I’ve crossed pinks, bicolor, whites, reverses etc. etc. using Jamie Radcliff’s wonderful ‘Lutana’ as both a seed and pollen parent. ‘Lutana’ is not a trumpet but looks like a trumpet although 3-4mm short. The seed parent used for the attached seedling is a 1W-P seedling of mine with a strong rose pink trumpet.
The seedling below is one of the very, very, very few that measures true trumpet (this one is trumpet by 3mm) and has a reasonable orange cast. The color does have a salmon pink component but appears orange. It does seem to me that there is some undefined linkage between trumpet length and color. The flower has a reasonable show form.
In my experience, here, the best orange color, almost invariably, is in the progeny that does not measure trumpet in length. As soon as one arrives at “equal to or greater than” (trumpet or Div. 1 definition) in length, the trumpet color value decreases markedly. In my estimation it is not a halving of color value but more in the neighborhood of 20% of the color value. My sense of the matter is that once we begin to produce flowers that “break” the speculated linkage between trumpet length and color, we hybridizers will be “off to the races” and we’ll be able to create true White/Red trumpets.
Steve

Steve Vinisky Sherwood, Oregon USA